Working For Money vs. Money Working For You

You know how people say that you should always have your money working for you rather than you working for your money? I.e. passive income?

Here’s what that means in the real world :)

When I was a kid I’d spend one hour mowing a lawn and earn $10

When I was a teen I’d spend all weekend at a restaurant to earn $50

When I was in college I’d spend 20 hours a week and get $150

When I got my first “real” job I’d spend 40 hours a week to get my hands on $500

When I moved up the ladder a bit I’d spend 50 hours a week to bring home $1,000

When I became self-employed I’d work 60-70 hours a week and barely bring back $1,500

Each of these cases required gobs of my time in return for these precious piles of greenbacks.

Now get this…

Last month I spent 0 hours on my investments and made a whopping $32,687.28.

In one month.

For doing absolutely nothing.

That equates to 3,268 hours of mowing lawns, 653 weekends of working at a restaurant, 218 weeks working at the college bookstore, 65 weeks at my first full-time job, 33 weeks after I climbed up the ladder, and 22 weeks when I first became self-employed.

That’s a lot of working for the exact same pay! And the exact difference between working for your money and having your money work for you ;)

Now obviously with investing you have plenty of down months too depending on what you’re investing in (stocks, real estate, businesses), but the net result is almost guaranteed to be amazing if you keep at it for the long haul. And it all starts with a couple dollars locked in a bedroom, candles lit with slow jams on, until bow chicka wha wha! BABY MONIES!!! Who go on to create baby monies of their own until one day you wake up to a huge (incestuous) family of monies you can play with in retirement :)

Whoever said budgets were sexy had it wrong. It’s more like passive income is sexy, baby! Haha…

And in case you’re wondering, this is also how “the rich get richer.” It’s not that they’re necessarily working more than you are, it’s just that their gobs of money are exploding at a much faster pace than yours. In fact, the more money you have the less talent it takes to grow it – hah! (Okay, that may not be right all the way, but you get what I’m saying ;))

Point is, you need to start funneling those dollars over NOW if you’re serious about growing wealth. I don’t care how you do it or how much you put in (you can literally put in pennies if you want to!) but plant those seeds now and get your family growing… It’s boring at first, but once the momentum picks up you’ll quickly notice how empowered you feel and how much extra money you somehow seem to have to keep feeding the flames too.

It’s hard for you to make money, but it’s not hard for your money to make money.

There aren’t any investments that will give us such a return, but we all have a penny to start with!

Get out there and make some babies!

*****This is the first time btw that I’ve ever compared the evolution of how I’ve made money over the years… I wasn’t going to post this cuz I didn’t want to come off as boastful, but I was just blown away at how drastic the comparisons were! I mean, $30k for doing nothing?? It’s crazy, right? And yet so simple a caveman can do it anyone can do it! ;)

Working For Money vs. Money Working For You was last modified: November 19th, 2015 by J. Money

Agreed, but it’s proportionally scary to see your wealth drop by much more than you actually make, on bad market months (August this year, anyone?). I prefer to look at the overall year, to avoid emotional roller coasters :)

Wow…looking at what you made last month in passive income has suddenly made me feel quite inadequate :) We’re getting there, though. And the journey is part of the fun, right? I LOVE reading these articles and getting pumped. It’s so motivating to see someone who has done it and is enjoying the fruits of their labor, or, in this case, the passive cash that is being generated without labor). Even better! We just started our outside-of-retirement investment vehicle (aside from continuing to pay off the mortgage) and we’re hungry to put every. spare. dollar. into it. Thanks for the Friday morning motivation.

Thanks for this reminder. :) I’m really only starting to realize that even little amounts of money do make a big difference over time. I think part of the reason I had so little interest in investing for so many years was because I thought, well, I don’t make very much and thus wouldn’t be able to invest very much, so why bother? But to think how much more I’d have now if I’d even bothered to invest $20/month…Ah well, too bad! In any case, I’m now investing about $250/month, spread across Betterment, Acorns, and my Roth IRA. Better late than never.

Great post; I wish I would’ve understood this earlier than I did. But it does take some years of working for money before most people can get their money working for them. My 4-year-old was just telling me that you can’t count to a million counting by ones. “You have to count with different numbers,” he said, and he was talking about his favorite car-ride game–asking me to double 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. I couldn’t help but think he was talking about compounding interest and how true it is that you don’t get to a million one by one.

I agree! it is awesome when you money is earning you an income without you having to do a single thing for it. Last month my investments made me twice as much as my job did. But the flip side of that really sucks when your money goes on strike like it did back in August and September. That’s why we choose to look at all of our investments as long term and my jobs as the short term that gets us there.

I love it when it just so happenes that your posts line up nicely with my most recent posts, my last post discusses the Rule of 72 and how it is used to estimate how long it will take your investments to double in value. It makes me feel like I’m onto something good if it lines up with the upcoming J$ post.

Compound interest is awesome! We are currently in turbo mode on debt repayment, but once the debt is gone (about six months), we definitely plan to start funneling some of the freed-up cash into investments!! Cannot wait!!!

“And it all starts with a couple dollars locked in a bedroom, candles lit with slow jams on, until bow chicka wha wha! BABY MONIES!!! Who go on to create baby monies of their own until one day you wake up to a huge (incestuous) family of monies you can play with in retirement :)”

Love it, J$. I still remember my first dividend payment almost as fondly as the birth of my first child. I was sitting in my cubicle, just before the Christmas holidays. Overcast skies making the mood dreary. Then I logged into my Vanguard account and saw a little over $100 magically appear in my account. The first of many dividends I would receive. That $3000 investment in Vanguard’s Pacific Index Fund (VPACX) netted me some triple digit love just in time for Christmas (I didn’t spend it of course :) ).

The same as the birth of your first child, haha…. one a lot less scarier! I remember thinking how insane it was that someone would allow me to take a real life human being home with me without any “how to” manual or anything… boy do you learn fast! :)

I’ve got all my funds split around and they do all generate nice returns but the desire to dump into just one account (VXC) like you did is tempting. I like the mixed Euro/US Vanguard fund over our homegrown Vanguard (VCN) as it is so heavily weighted with equities (Oil stocks) that the volatility is intense. The quarterly dump of dividends is from the Vanguards is awesome and love putting them right back to work by buying more ETF units. My market exempt (private equity) funds generate stable great returns but the only problem is that the dividends get spot out into a cash holding account and my money doesn’t go to work right away for me (a sleeping army) Anyhow, kick ass on the monthly growth dude and keep hustling and spreading the sexy money love. Cheers Chris

It’s def. nice and easy/simple being in one, but if you know what you’re doing like it seems you do (much more than I it seems!) you’re probably fine either way. I may add a bond index or foreign index later, but right now I’m liking the minimalist approach :)

I tell my clients all the time that they work hard for their money and they need to make sure their money is working for them. If you leave money sitting in a checking account it’s the equivalent of allowing your money to be a couch potato. If you invest your money, it’s the equivalent of putting your money on a treadmill and getting it into shape for you. Congrats on an awesome month!

Money doesn’t sleep, get sick, or tire. It just works for you, relentlessly, 24/7. And it can work far harder than you can once you’ve got enough of those workers out there buzzing around for you, as you saw firsthand this month. It’s much better to be an investor than a worker. And it’s not even all that hard to make that transition. You just have to start. :)

Yeah, it’s great when your monthly returns hit it big like that. I was looking at my returns for October and they were larger than my yearly salary for most of my working years — all in one month.

But it’s all winnings on paper. If you take the year as a whole, my return for the year is less than 1%. But I can’t complain — over 10 years, I’ve received over 8% return on investment ANNUALLY. So someone putting $100k in an investment fund and letting it sit for 10 years at 8%, they would have $215,982 with no effort exerted. That’s money making babies!

Yup! That’s the only less sexy part really – that you don’t actually get to take out the $$$ and see it in cold hard cash :) I suppose at some point you will, but until then just gotta keep lighting those candles and get ready for the party one day! It’s a beautiful thing!

I don’t feel like my money is making a lot of baby monies yet but when I look back to the beginning of the year it really is a pretty significant increase–mostly from saving. I think I have heard people say you really start to notice the compounding when you get up over about $200,000.

This is kind of a deceiving post. It sounds impressive….until you look at the -$7,000 in September and the -$23,000 in August. I don’t really consider the short term rises in the stock market to be passive income.

Yes, true the market swings in both directions, but I can tell you for a fact I didn’t invest $400,000 into the market over time ;) I’ve never calculated it before, but I guarantee 50-60% of that money were all gains. So whether it counts as passive income now, or decades from now when it gets pulled out, it’s still money that was made without lifting a finger.

I guess money takes a day off when you lose $23,000 in a month when the stock market goes down.
Again, this passive income is for an isolated month. If you include the losses from August and September, it amounts to a ‘passive income’ of $22 per day…

And if you go back to other months in the year it’ll be different too. You can cherry pick anything to make a case which you and I are both doing here, but the overall point is that it’s much better to set your money on a course to earn for you vs trading manual labor for it. That’s what I’m trying to get into peoples’ heads today.

Congrats….but a word of caution….The Fed is going to raise rates. It’s a lot easier to make money when the cost of capital is 0% then when it’s 4-5%….the historic norm. Then the worries of inflation…oil prices….a strong dollar come home to roost…. “Keep your powder dry”….I remember getting statements back in ’08 that were “breathtaking” and not in a good way. Let’s not forget Washington Mutual was “swept away” the last time the “tide went out” and they were huge. The market just may be a “bear trap” right now.

But how much money is enough? I think that is a starting point here. After answering that one (almost impossible) you can mobe money to generate it self. Key problem is a mindset. Let’s say my goal i sto reach 1 mill. savings. If I reach it, what next? Most people will move to 2 mill. goal. But imagine that you sign a contract with public notary saying you only need 1 mill. Even if you do so, you are again I problem. Maybe even biger one. You reached your goal. Ordinary people need a goal, need a carrot. :)

It’s definitely a slippery slope, yes :) and usually at the end of the day we realize it was never about the money to begin with! I’m constantly evaluating my lifestyle and trying to figure out what truly makes me happy… it’s taking a while, but I get little insights here and there.

Wow — that’s crazy good for a month of returns! (One month?! Seriously?!) We’re at the point now where, even though we’re socking away money FAST, the markets still have a bigger effect on our portfolio than our contributions do. It’s humbling when times are bad, but also exactly what every investor is going for. That’s how things G-R-O-W, which is what we need ’em to do, so that we can have a long, fun retirement! :-)

Oh yeah – the market rules many portfolios once you get up there! Which is why some diversify more and get into other things like real estate or opening up businesses, etc. We all have our investing drug of choice :)

Love it! Its such a nice comparison J$. And puts “making money work for you” into an understandable perspective. On my way there hopefully! I’ve started it but slowly building it up month after month until one day, it’s working itself!

Preach it, brother!! Having money make more money is passive income at its finest. I love knowing that my money is making more money no matter what I’m doing. Passive income gives you more options in life, and having more options is what the game of money is all about.

I used to invest in a smattering of everything (individual funds, mutual funds, dividend funds), then about a year ago I wised up and stopped trying to beat the system and switched to index funds only :) In fact, just *one* index fund – VTSAX. That’s where all my investing dollars are.

Awesome read. Make that money work for you day and night. I just wrote an article about passive income streams, in preparation to start putting out passive income updates but in percentages. We’re not as brave as you guys are to put out our numbers!

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